the idea of tiny birds
by callmesandy
Summary: All the other victims: dead by the time the cavalry came. It's no wonder, they're on a cocktail of the finest drugs a mad scientist can cook up so they dream themselves into their best life while they're sucked dry. But not you. You go to your best life and realize it's not logically possible. (AU from Welcome to Westfield, Peter/Olivia.)


Title and opening quote from C Dylan Bassett's No Audience. For the trope_bingo square "trapped in a dream." Not mine, no profit garnered. Thanks to the JAM for awesome beta help. Very AU from the end of Welcome to Westfield.

* * *

 _Or, the sound of hail and what it broke. A highway like the corpse. A panic of  
trees. One hundred words for "sorrow."_

 _I have the idea of tiny birds. We were lovers but have since become estranged._  
 _(The sad man turns a knife inside his pocket.) What do you know about toast_  
 _about death about kitchen windows? The truth is seldom revealed._

Peter leaves Olivia's house, shaken. He doesn't understand how she remembers Damiano's, why she kissed him. Something is horribly wrong.

He hears someone running behind him as he walks home. Then everything goes black. The next time he opens his eyes, Walter is helping him up from a hospital bed. He smiles with recognition and says, "Welcome home, Son."

None of it is real. It is gradually, horrifically apparent to him that his idea that he been popped into another universe was wrong. This vision he's caught in becomes a nightmare of mockery to him, his Walter and Olivia are long overwritten.

He opens his eyes in a real hospital bed this time.

Peter said no visitors but it's a Massive Dynamic hospital wing of a real hospital so he's not surprised that Sam Weiss breezes in. Peter pointedly, petulantly, doesn't look up from his tablet.

Sam sits down in the chair next the bed. He waits and waits and finally says, "Funny you lived, isn't it?"

"I know who you are," Peter says.

"All the other victims: dead by the time the cavalry came. It's no wonder, they're on a cocktail of the finest drugs a mad scientist can cook up so they dream themselves into their best life while they're sucked dry. But not you. You go to your best life and realize it's not logically possible," Weiss says.

"It's possible," Peter says. "It's just not what happened. I'm not in a different universe. The timeline has changed and somehow I'm still here."

"Do you ever think about why that is?" Weiss sounds bored. Peter is insulted. Weiss says, "Maybe it's because Olivia and Walter subconsciously loved you too much to let you go."

"It would explain why I appeared to them," Peter says, trying to match Weiss's bored tone. He's not bored, though, he's exhausted and exasperated and bitter.

"10 brilliant women and men, floating along, dying and you're the one who just has to question the world you had around you," Weiss says.

"My life experiences have finally taught me to doubt my assumptions about reality. Took long enough," Peter says. "You don't think love saved me?"

"It sounds like the kind of thing bad guys say in movies to stop questions," Weiss says. "I believe in love, of course."

"Of course you do," Peter says. "Why do you think I'm here, then?"

"In the future, you and Walter built this machine, then you traveled back in time and planted the pieces. With a version of me," Weiss says.

"You remember that?" Peter is less bored.

"No, that'd be nuts. But the family history is more detailed than we usually let out," Sam says. "We keep it tight. Walter Bishop would never build anything that would let you die or be erased."

"That's written down somewhere?"

"Believe it or not, yes," Sam says.

"Thanks for letting me know," Peter says with no pretense of boredom and a fair amount of bitterness.

"You'd be dead right now if I'd told you," Sam says. "Your doubt wouldn't have saved you."

"Thank you," Peter says. "Are you going to leave now?"

"I thought you might want company," Sam says. "Trying to figure out the serial killer mad scientist's method? Instead of figuring out why Olivia Dunham suddenly remembers Olivia Dunham."

"It's the cortexiphan," Peter says. "That's been figured out."

"You're totally sure," Sam says.

"Are you here for her? Nina sent you," Peter says.

"No," Sam says. "I go where I go."

Peter doesn't even reply. Sam says, "You're a good person, and yet, here you are, being petulant."

"How do you know I'm a good person?"

Sam looks at him. It's an oddly disconcerting gaze. Peter says, "How do you know?"

Sam says, "It's in the collective memory of my family. Do you believe what we know can be known so deeply even our children and our children's children know it?"

"Not in the slightest, that's ridiculous," Peter says. "You've got it written down in one of your scrolls and you accept it. Didn't you tell Nina Sharp everything would be okay if I just loved Olivia enough? How right was that?"

"That wasn't the me that's sitting here. And it wasn't necessarily wrong," Sam says. "What I feel comfortable saying to Nina and what I say to you or Olivia is not always the same thing."

Peter rolls his eyes. "What do you want from me? I'm tired."

"I don't want anything," Sam says. "I was just stopping by." Thankfully, he leaves.

Peter had lost 30% of his body weight in that damn tube, there's damage to his pancreas, liver, and kidneys. He keeps playing with schematics to figure if there's a way to jumpstart his recovery. He doesn't know what the fuck he does after that.

Walter comes to visit next. "You are back to thinking you were popped back into the timeline after being written out?"

"Someone suggested it was you who did it," Peter says. "You built the machine, with my help, but mostly you. It would be like you to put something in there to make sure I wouldn't be lost."

"That does sound like me," Walter says. "But why would I have had you come back as some sort of magnetic force and through dreams?"

"I don't know," Peter says. "Olivia is linked to the machine, she's in all the pictures, like me. I don't know, Walter."

"You seem miserable," Walter says, commiserating. "You're home."

Peter frowns. "I was home, and it was wrong, I knew it was wrong. I'll never have that again. I'll never have you and Olivia again."

"You have us now," Walter says. He pats Peter's hand. "I know I'm not the same as you remember. I can certainly try to be -"

"Walter," Peter says. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to make you feel bad. I'm just, I'm trying to figure out how to get back to full strength."

"I can help with that," Walter says. He gets up and start buzzing around the room, looking at the charts and output.

Walter is very helpful, even this Walter who can get much closer to the mind of serial killer mad scientist than Peter is comfortable with (Peter can, too, he's not that comfortable with that, either).

He starts to get better, faster.

Lincoln comes to visit. He says, "I think you know more about what's happening to Olivia than anyone else. Someone gave her all this cortexiphan, she's starting to remember your timeline. Walter doesn't know how to help her and she needs help. At first she was almost happy about it, but now she's just scared of losing her past and gaining some nonsense timeline."

"I don't know more than Walter about cortexiphan," Peter says. He doesn't want to see Olivia. He knows it's awful of him. All he's been trying to do is get Olivia back, and he loved her, he even loves this new Olivia a little bit, but fuck it. He's even more an alien than he ever was in his own timeline, he can wear that old skin comfortably, he thinks. He can cut all these people loose, make a new name, go anywhere until his legs itch and he has to go again.

Lincoln says, "You knew that Walter could hypnotize that girl, you know about how the experiments worked on your side. You're not this guy, Peter."

"You have no idea what kind of person I am," Peter says, reflexively, without thought. Then he says, "I'm tired, I'll try to come by next week."

"Next week might not be soon enough," Lincoln says. He's angry when he leaves.

Peter doesn't remember his dreams anymore. He did when he first got back, now, after the tube, he just wakes up rested. Bless that mad scientist.

He drags himself to the lab. Walter fusses at him and immediately starts talking about an idea he had about growing a pancreas to graft onto Peter's. "All the organs are back and working," Peter says, sitting down. "Remember, we were going to focus on the metabolism issues."

"I know, I know," Walter says. "It disturbs me, though, it worries me, those results. I remember these symptoms."

"It's not the disease that killed me," Peter says. "As awkward as that sounds, you know what I mean, Walter. I'm cured of that one. So, Lincoln yelled at me about Olivia."

"Yes," Walter says, sitting back down. He pushes aside an omelet, and Peter wonders how much of a pancreas is growing in it. "Yes," Walter says, again. "The cortexiphan. Someone has injected it, has been injecting and causing her migranes. And her remembering your timeline. Someone tried to kidnap her, but she is safe now, that's what Astrid tells me."

"They're probably trying to activate her," Peter says.

"Yes," Walter says. "We didn't do that so much, we didn't give them enough."

"David Robert Jones didn't go around activating the other kids in the experiments, right?"

"No, no, we never knew him before this, though I understand he worked with Belly and Nina," Walter says.

"Where's Olivia now?"

Walter stands up and starts pacing. "Astrid and Lincoln are moving her around. I will have to call them."

Peter says, "She remembers both timelines, right?"

"Yes, it's very distressing to her. Both set of memories are rushing around in her head, battling back and forth. Of course, it's Olivia, so she continues to work and tries to be very independent, I understand everyone is very frustrated trying to get her to rest or sit down," Walter says.

"Sounds like Olivia," Peter says. "Okay, so she's bursting with cortexiphan, so much of it, it's altering her perception wildly. So you want to stabilize her."

"Stabilize her brain," Walter says.

"Maybe you just need to put her in the tank," Peter says.

"Oooooooooooh, the tank," Walter says. "I don't use that nearly enough. I haven't used it at all, I think, not in the past few years. Not since before St. Claire's."

"What about when John Scott was sick?"

"No, no, I had that thought, that idea, it occurred to me, I forgot to say. I forgot to say it and then it was too late," Walter says.

"It was a good idea," Peter says. "First and foremost, if you haven't used it in 20 years, that things needs to be sterilized. Second, in my timeline, activating the cortexiphan kids was part of Jones's plan to, I don't know honestly. He had someone activating all the kids from the experiments, he rebuilt your machine and tried to get to the other side to see Bell. He wanted to activate Olivia and he did, sort of. Isn't all this in my debriefing?"

"I suppose," Walter says. "Didn't read it."

Peter rubs his chest and tries to think. "Let me see the test results you got, Walter."

He spends all day with Walter and it's frustrating and only slightly fruitful. Walter says, "I definitely have some ideas about getting you working again, Son, I promise."

"Thanks," Peter says.

He goes back to his special wing and settles into his bed, exhausted more than usual. Weeks ago he used to dream about being home. Olivia and Walter, he thinks. It's breaking his heart. He laughs at himself. Before Flight 127, Peter wasn't doing so bad.

He wakes up when the door opens. "No visitors," he says, his voice more of a croak.

"Even me," Olivia says. She sits in the chair everyone sits in. "Or is it especially me?"

"Sorry," Peter says. It hurts to look at her so he doesn't.

"Walter says you want to put me in an isolation tank," Olivia says. "It's been so long."

He wonders if she switched from one set of memories to another in the space of two sentences. It sounds like torture. He says, "It should help."

"I need help," Olivia says. "I don't want to forget here. Rachel's married, happily, he's such a good guy, he's so good with Ella and Eddie. I don't want to lose that. But sometimes I totally forget it and I want to see Ella and forget she has a brother or a different father. This life is a good life. I had a good life, too."

It hurts to hear the pain in her voice. He says, "We just need to give you the tools. I don't think we can take away one or the other set."

"It hurts seeing you," she says. "We're back together but we aren't at all. And I remember you with so much love but I don't want to forget -"

"Your prom date? Spending time with Lincoln?"

She laughs a little. "Both. Sorry," Olivia says. "You wanted to get home so bad."

"I was an idiot," Peter says. "But having you remember sporadically who we were isn't actually getting home. It's as bad as the fake world in the tube. I don't mean to make your obvious pain all about me or compare it, I'm trying to say I don't feel like being a good person."

"You feel like being a criminal again," Olivia says. "You don't do well staying in one place again."

"It's creepy you remember that," Peter says.

"God, I know, I'm creeped out. I'm so sick of my head," Olivia says. "I'm sick of the experiments and being everyone's favorite test subject."

"The tank should help," Peter says. "Was it like this when you were coming out from the brainwashing that made you think you were the other Olivia?"

Olivia is silent. Then she says, "Yes. It's pretty similar. But that just went away, mostly. Isn't weird to think the two of us, we're the only ones who know that," she pauses. "Everything's weird."

"Everything is weird." Peter turns to look at her. She's pale and drawn, her hair pulled back.

He can never leave her.

He says, "Once we stabilize what's happening, we can try to finally help you make that cortexiphan work for you. In the future, you could."

"You have future memories, too?" Olivia tries to smile.

"When I first got in the machine, my consciousness was thrown forward to the future, to a future, where I had destroyed the other side and our side was dying," Peter says. He sees Olivia dead again. "You died. Shot in the head. So I worked with Walter to create the machine and to make sure I wouldn't destroy the other side when I went in."

"Do you remember all of it? The future, the machine, putting the parts together?"

"I know it happened," Peter says. "It fades all the time, and I'm grateful. It's too much for me to carry."

"Are you going to fade out my memories, too much to carry for me?"

Peter smiles. "I don't mean to brag, but mine is full of quantum physics and remaking universes so it's much more hard to carry, thank you very much."

"Are you trying to tell me yours is bigger?"

He looks at her again and she's smiling. He says, "Yes, I am."

He holds out his hand and she takes it. They fit perfectly. They always do. She surprises him by getting up and getting in the bed with him. She's careful not to disturb his IVs and monitors. She says, "Even before the cortexiphan, I was falling for you a little."

"Am I the reason you and Lincoln broke up?"

She says, "Don't sound so smug. It had nothing to do with you. At all."

"I liked you, too," he says. "Felt a little bad about it. Like I was transferring my affection for the real you to this one."

"I was real, I am real," Olivia says. Her hand on his chest presses down. "You're so skinny."

"I'm working on it," he says. "You're a little skinny, too."

"My head hurts a lot," she says.

"I was nearly killed by a mad scientist serial killer," he says.

She kisses his neck and he runs his hand through her hair. "The isolation tank and Walter will help," he says. "We'll make this work."

"How does this even work?" Olivia relaxes against him.

"We help you delineate each experience, help shape your perceptions. Cortexiphan, in you, does whatever you want it to, as long as you believe in yourself," Peter says. "You have so much power, Olivia, we can make this work. Then we'll figure out why they put so much cortexiphan in you. Then we'll fix everything."

"I love a lot about my life," she says. "Intermittently, I love you."

"We'll find a way for you to keep both," Peter says. "Not the intermittent part, though, I'm going to make you swoon in affection even before I regain my rugged good looks."

She smiles and he feels it in his skin. "Promise," Peter says, like an idiot.


End file.
